


[no act of kindness] No Matter How Small [is ever wasted]

by everyperfectsummer



Series: attempts at everlark for nortberts mom [2]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Background Relationships, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Neglect, F/M, Gen, Mentions of alcoholism, Minor Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark, Other, but he's actually doing pretty well, he doesn't think he's qualified either, local vet and alcoholic adopts neighborhood worth of kids, yes editing we do not die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 07:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16488137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Local vet is just trying to be an alcoholic in peace when neighbor asks if he can watch the kid for a few hours while she's at work. Fast forward to local vet buying sippy cups instead of beer after accidentally adopting half the neighborhood. Somehow turned into a love letter to fruit roll ups and small acts of kindness.





	[no act of kindness] No Matter How Small [is ever wasted]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Norberts_Mom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Norberts_Mom/gifts).



> This was initially written for Norberts_Mom but was so off base from the prompt she asked for I had to write something else. Thanks to NM for getting me to write in this fandom!
> 
> Many thanks to laz-duck for betaing this for me, you are a gem!
> 
> Please feel free to let me know if there are typos in here that I missed; please let me alone about the POV change half way through, I know it's there and believe me I've already run through half a dozen ways to possibly change it.

Katniss got down from the bus, turning to wave briefly at the dinosaur painted on its side to differentiate her bus from the squirrel bus from the cat bus from all the other buses before breaking into a sprint. She hit Haymitch’s door running, slamming the door open before darting over to where he was lying on the couch, a baby monitor on his chest. “Haymitch! Haymitch! Haymiiiiitch!”

She scrabbled up onto the piece of furniture, using the low table next to it to lever herself up and onto his legs. “Guess what!”

He let out a wince as he sat up. “Careful with using old folks as a jungle gym kid, this body’s been through too many wars for you all to bounce on it.” 

“Mom says you were only in one war,” Katniss objected, although she still did her best to be super super careful as she moved onto the arm of the couch instead.

“You tell your mom that the war against our hegemonic institutions and also counts,” he said with a weird twist in his mouth, like Mom got when talking about work. She wondered briefly what Haymitch was sad about, and then moved back to her news, because no one can be sad about fruit-roll ups and also it was news and he was always asking about her day, right, so if she told him about her day he’d be less sad maybe. And also she had to tell someone or she was going to explode, just like those people on TV.

“Haymitch, I have to tell you about my day,” she said as seriously as she could, still bouncing a little on the couch arm. “My day at school. It’s important.”

He nodded back, just as seriously, but looking less weird and sad than just before. “Alright sweetheart, regale me with the tales of your scholastic adventures.”

“I was at school today, and I was supposed to have lunch, but I’m on free and reduced, not free, and I was out of money before last time Gale came over, but now I’m more out of money, and so Karen’s mom can’t give me lunch, they were our example when Ms. Effie was teaching us about science,” Haymitch was looking sad and weird again and she explained, “Karen’s mom is the lunch lady, which is why they both have red hair, it’s super rare like being a Canadian, so it’s weird for two people to have red hair by chance, but since they’re related it’s not weird it’s science.” She paused as something she hadn’t thought about before occurred to her. “But Prim’s blond and I’m brown but Mom’s blond too but I’m not. So maybe it’s not science. But so Mom keeps forgetting so they keep giving me pieces of paper to show her but she doesn’t look at them even though they’re pink, so I was going to not have lunch again and this boy came and he told me his mom gives him lunch from home and he’d share with me because sharing is caring but he didn’t give me half! He gave me half his sandwich and look!”

She dug into her pocket and presented her trophy triumphantly. “He gave me all of his fruit roll-ups!”

“That was pretty sweet of him,” Haymitch said, emphasizing the word in the middle like a joke even though it was sweet of him. She frowned.

“You don’t get it, it was sweet, it was really nice of him. He said it was a present and he wanted me to have it even though it tastes good.” She looked at the package in her hand, somewhat dismayed. “But it was nice and I need to remember it so I want to put it on the shelf with the dead people pictures to remember he gave me a present but that means that I can’t eat it.”

Haymitch stood up from the couch, groaning slightly like he always did when he stood up, placing a hand briefly on his knee before using it to gesture at the shelves on the wall. “Tell you what. How about you draw the present and the kid who gave it to you, and that way you can still eat the fruit-roll up but also have something so you can remember it? We can put the drawing up on the memory shelf instead of the dessert.”

She tilted her head, considering, before nodding decisively and heading for the crayon selection.

“Meanwhile, I’m going to check on younger kids, including your sister, because they’re being suspiciously quiet after saying they were absolutely never going to nap.” She rolled her eyes at him, which he took as enough acknowledgement that he could leave without her wondering where he’d gone. Not that it’d be unusual for her or any of the kids who’d colonized his house to be suddenly abandoned by the adults supposed to be watching them, but he was trying to be better than that. After a surreptitious check of the smallest kids, who were in fact asleep, and a glance outside to make sure that Gale, Rory, and Madge had managed to continue their elaborate pirate-dragon-frog game without stabbing each other for realism’s sake, he took the landline outside to the front of the house where the kids couldn’t hear to leave a piece of his mind on the school’s voicemail, along with the demand to call him back with the amount they considered sufficient before they allowed children to fucking eat.

Then he headed back inside, reentering the fray of toys and dirt, tantrums and tattling and elaborate stories without plots or consistent characters, doing his best to take care of what felt like half of county Twelve’s children before ushering them back to the houses of the people who were supposed to take care of them and collapsing onto the couch Katniss had found him on hours ago, silently debating whether it’d be better to clean the mess up tonight or to get up early for it tomorrow. 

He’s not sure what he decided that or any night, although he can now say with long years of experience that it is always, always better to clean it up that night. He’s also not sure exactly why Katniss left the drawing at his house instead of the shelf her mother used as a mixed display case of her living loved ones as well as a mausoleum for those she’d lost, whether it was on the fridge because he’d thought it a good idea or because she’d insisted on displaying it, but he does know that the multi-colored swirl is supposed to be fruit by the foot, the misshapen rectangles are supposed to be the tables in the lunch room, and that the smiley face with yellow on top is supposed to be Peeta Mellark.

Haymitch meets him eventually, all gangly limbs and wide-eyed admiration of Katniss being “like Legolas Mr. Haymitch, she can just shoot things like pew-pew but without a gun and she brought a squirrel into show and tell and it was so cool.” He sees him make cakes and burn them while experimenting, get into a rivalry with Gale that’s supposedly about Katniss but really about class and care and whose grass is greener, sees him take shifts with Prim and Vicky so that they can share the sleep deprivation when Vicky gets it into his head to nurse a baby squirrel back to health with Pedialyte and sheer persistence, sees him shoot up and bulk out and still be the gentlest person around, and most of all, he sees him be kind. 

He didn’t know anything about them but their parents harried faces when they asked if he could watch them for a little bit that turned into forever, those kids who now are his. Just names, ages, and “can you watch them?” and he did, watched them all grow up. Except for Peeta, whose family was rich enough for real babysitters and so never needed to drop him off on the local lay about, who would have had the means to send him to a fancy preschool where they ask for applications to get in. He’d never intended to become a daycare and wouldn’t have asked for applications if he had, but if he had asked for them, then the crayon on his fridge would have been the best application he could have received.

Throughout the years, when Peeta goes from a story to a child he’s met to a gangly teen who has joined the gang of children-tweens-teens practically living in his home, Haymitch thinks back to the smile on Katniss’s face and the crayon scrawl she used to depict it, of a boy whose kindness he heard about before he met the boy, the boy who grew up to be a kind man. If he had to point to the kindest thing Peeta’d ever done, fruit-roll ups wouldn’t make the top fifty, overshadowed by hospital visits and volunteering and checking the fields for baby deer before the tractors went through. But they are the kindness that Haymitch will always remember, long after Peeta and Katniss’s children draw crayon artworks of their own.


End file.
